WEEK 16 | APRIL 2026
In June 2021, Ocean Infinity acquired Ambrey. On the surface, a straightforward corporate transaction: a maritime technology company buying a security consultancy. Look closer and it’s something else entirely.
Ambrey was founded in 2010 in Hereford, UK, by ex-British military personnel at the peak of the Somali piracy crisis. Its core business was simple and brutal: put armed guards on ships so pirates couldn’t take the crew hostage. By the time Ocean Infinity bought it, Ambrey had grown into one of the world’s largest maritime security firms, protecting more vessels than almost any competitor. Ocean Infinity, meanwhile, had just completed construction of the first vessels in what would become the world’s largest commercial fleet of lean-crewed autonomous offshore ships.
One company’s corporate history maps perfectly onto the transformation this piece is about. The threat model that built Ambrey is becoming obsolete. The world Ocean Infinity is building has no equivalent security architecture to replace it.
That gap, legal, doctrinal, and financial, is what this deep dive is about.
Section 1: The framework that piracy built
Between 2008 and 2012, Somali pirates took roughly 3,741 crew members of 125 nationalities hostage across 125 vessels. They collected between $339 million and $413 million in ransoms, the World Bank’s best estimate from its 2013 analysis of the crisis. Average ransom in 2011: approximately $5 million per vessel. Average negotiation duration: 178 days. The single largest payment: $13.5 million for the Greek-owned VLCC Irene SL.
The international community’s response to this was comprehensive, coordinated, and entirely human-centric.
Best Management Practices evolved from BMP1 in 2009 through BMP5 in 2018, formalising citadel protocols, transit corridor procedures, and the conditions under which armed guards could operate. The IMO’s guidance on Privately Contracted Armed Security Personnel followed in 2011, a framework developed specifically because the major maritime organisations had previously opposed armed guards aboard merchant ships. The UK announced authorisation for armed guards on October 30, 2011. Germany followed in March 2013. Within two years of peak piracy, the industry had built an entire private security ecosystem from scratch.
By all available accounts, no ship with armed guards was ever successfully hijacked during the Somali piracy era. The combination of BMP compliance, naval presence from EU NAVFOR Atalanta and NATO Ocean Shield, and the deterrent effect of armed security teams broke the business model. Piracy collapsed after 2012. The Indian Ocean High Risk Area designation was lifted in January 2023.
The Gulf of Guinea then demonstrated that the human-centric model was the model, not just one option among many. West African piracy operates on a different economics: not ship-and-crew ransoms held for months, but kidnap-for-ransom targeting the two to six most valuable crew members, typically the master and chief engineer, held ashore in the Niger Delta for three to eight weeks at $30,000 to $100,000 per group. In 2020, the Gulf of Guinea accounted for over 95% of maritime kidnappings globally. By 2021, it accounted for 100%.
Different geography, different tactics, identical logic. Crew are the target because crew have ransom value. Armed guards, citadels, naval escorts, emergency satellite communications: everything the maritime security industry built assumes humans aboard who need protecting, rescuing, or ransoming.
Remove the crew and the entire architecture has nothing to protect.
Section 2: The new attack surface
On the night of August 29, 2022, the IRGCN support ship Shahid Baziar was observed towing a US Navy Saildrone Explorer unmanned surface vessel through the central Persian Gulf. USS Thunderbolt and an MH-60S helicopter responded. After four hours, the Iranians cut the tow line and departed.
Three days later, Iranian Navy frigate IRIS Jamaran seized two more Saildrone Explorers in the Red Sea. Iranian sailors initially concealed the drones under tarps and denied holding them. US destroyers USS Nitze and USS Delbert D. Black arrived, established radio contact, and negotiated the return. The Saildrones were released approximately 20 hours after seizure. Iranian state television broadcast footage of crew pushing the vessels off the Jamaran’s deck.
Iran’s stated justification: the autonomous vessels posed a danger to safe navigation. A customary duty of mariners, they argued, is to remove hazards from shipping lanes. With no crew aboard, nobody could dispute the claim in the moment. With no master to hail, nobody could identify the vessel, confirm its status, or assert its rights. The US Navy’s entire response depended on crewed destroyers arriving quickly enough to compel release through sheer proximity.
That response mechanism, sending a warship, is not available to commercial operators. It is not a scalable solution.
The Saildrone incidents were the clearest demonstration yet of what the new attack surface looks like. Remove the crew, and you remove the ransom leverage that defined Somali-era piracy. You also remove every layer of situational awareness, judgment, and resistance that stood between the vessel and those who would interfere with it.
GPS spoofing: the precision threat
Hormuz has been a GPS warfare zone for years. In 2019, the UK tanker Stena Impero was seized by Iran; analysts concluded GPS spoofing was likely involved in redirecting the vessel into Iranian waters, with US defence officials later confirming Iran had deployed GPS jammers on Abu Musa Island for exactly this purpose.
The 2025 to 2026 Hormuz crisis intensified this dramatically. GPS interference has affected thousands of vessels, with supertankers appearing to navigation systems to be circling over dry land. One commercial analytics provider, Windward, recorded more than 5,000 unique vessels experiencing GPS or AIS interference across a single quarter of 2025, with other datasets showing similar scale.
For a crewed vessel, an experienced master reconciles GPS readings against radar returns, visual landmarks, depth soundings, and crucially, the accumulated professional judgment of a human who knows when something is wrong. For a Level 4 autonomous system operating in a geofenced transit corridor, spoofed GPS coordinates that place the vessel somewhere it is not represent an instruction, not an anomaly. The system acts on the data it receives. Compelling it into Iranian territorial waters requires a laptop and a signal, not a boarding party.
The 2017 Black Sea mass spoofing event — in which over 20 vessels simultaneously reported GPS positions at Gelendzhik Airport, 25 nautical miles from their actual locations — was assessed by the C4ADS research group as almost certainly a by-product of Russian military drone countermeasures protecting VIP movements. The maritime disruption was incidental. Future actors targeting autonomous vessels specifically would not be incidental.
Cyber intrusion: the infrastructure threat
The maritime sector’s cyber vulnerability record is not theoretical. NotPetya reached Maersk in June 2017 through a Ukrainian tax software update. Within hours, every internet-connected device across the company was compromised. Rebuilding 4,000 servers, 45,000 PCs, and 2,500 applications took ten days. Cost: $250 to $300 million. In July 2023, ransomware shut down all container operations at the Port of Nagoya, Japan’s largest, for two days. In 2025, a hacktivist group disconnected 116 tankers from the internet simultaneously by wiping VSAT partitions, cutting all communications, including ship-to-shore VOIP.
One industry survey found that reported maritime cyberattacks roughly doubled between 2024 and 2025, with ransomware incidents rising by around 150%. None of these incidents specifically involved autonomous vessels. But the progression matters: attacks on maritime infrastructure are becoming more frequent, more sophisticated, and more targeted at the communication and control systems that autonomous vessels depend on entirely.
High-power microwave: the blunt instrument
Beyond cyber intrusion and GPS spoofing, there is a class of threat that requires no signal path into the vessel’s systems at all. High-power microwave weapons, directed energy systems that target electronics directly, are now operationally tested against autonomous surface vessels.
In 2024, the US Navy tested Epirus’ Leonidas HPM system at ANTX-CT24, specifically evaluating its ability to temporarily disable small vessels, including when mounted on uncrewed platforms. In April 2025, Epirus introduced Leonidas H2O, and in ANTX-CT24 Coastal Trident trials, the prototype disrupted four commercially available 40 to 90 horsepower boat engines at tactically relevant ranges, in some cases from an uncrewed platform.
This is not a future capability. The DoD spent years and tens of millions of dollars developing a non-kinetic vessel-stopping solution without fielding one, then a commercial defence company demonstrated it against real vessels in Navy trials. The threat cuts both ways: what the Navy is developing to stop adversary autonomous vessels, adversaries can develop to stop ours.
The key point for commercial autonomous operators is that HPM bypasses the air-gap defence entirely. Hardened against cyber intrusion, isolated from GPS dependency, running on redundant sensors: none of that matters if the vessel’s electronics can be disrupted from range without any communication link. Large naval vessels benefit from steel hull construction that provides natural electromagnetic shielding. A fibreglass-hulled commercial autonomous vessel running commercial off-the-shelf electronics does not.
The most underappreciated threat: the parking lot
Here is the scenario that does not appear in any published security analysis, but should.
A Level 4 autonomous vessel running COLREGS-compliant collision avoidance encounters an obstacle in its transit corridor. It does what it is designed to do: stop, or manoeuvre around within its programmed parameters. It does not escalate. It does not call for help. It does not override its safety protocols because a human has assessed the situation and concluded that a blocked channel is a hostile act rather than a navigational hazard.
Iran does not need missiles to stop an autonomous tanker in Hormuz. They need a fishing boat and patience.
Park it across the channel and wait. The autonomous vessel halts itself. It becomes a drifting, uncrewed asset in contested international waters with no master to assess the situation, no crew to resist boarding, and no legal framework capable of resolving what happens next.
The crewed vessel equivalent requires Iran to actually coerce a master into stopping. That is an internationally documented act with witnesses, a distress call, flag state obligations, and diplomatic consequences. Blocking an autonomous vessel generates legal ambiguity the existing framework cannot resolve, at essentially zero cost to the blocker.